Astronaut’s Remarkable Image Captures Milky Way Beyond Earth’s Horizon

An astronaut recently captured an image of Earth from the International Space Station that offers an entirely different view of our world and what lies beyond.

Astronaut Don Pettit captured the image when the ISS was about 265 miles above the Pacific Ocean on January 29, 2025. The image was taken just before sunrise, so the parts of the world visible in the photo are still cloaked in darkness.

In the background, the gassy, oblong Milky Way is visible. The Milky Way is seen edge-on, meaning that the photo looks across the galaxy’s diameter.

The photo was taken with a camera using low light and long duration settings, helping Pettit capture the blur of Earth’s rotation against a focused backdrop of Milky Way stars.

The photo is peculiar in that our planet—so famously blue and green with wisps of white clouds—is instead a mossy green hue. A thin band of white delineates the edge of the planet’s atmosphere and the boundary between our world and space.

Pettit is part of NASA’s Expedition 72 crew, a group that includes astronauts Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Nick Hague. Williams and Wilmore have featured prominently in recent headlines because they have been stuck in space. Their situation recently became a flash point when SpaceX owner Elon Musk claimed the astronauts were left stranded for political reasons, and traded barbs with a former ISS commander who insisted otherwise. Williams and Wilmore are currently expected to return to Earth in March on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

The day after this photo was taken, Williams and Wilmore conducted a 5.5-hour spacewalk. In doing so, Williams broke the record for the total spacewalk time by a woman, bringing her total to 62 hours and 6 minutes—surpassing the previous record of 60 hours and 21 minutes. So it’s not like the astronauts are wasting their time in the ISS as they await their return.

Meanwhile, Pettit’s photo enters a unique pantheon of images of our planet taken from orbit. Pettit also authored a remarkable shot of Earth with two satellite galaxies in the background back in December. As Pettit reported on X (formerly Twitter), he took the photo using a “home-made tracking device that allows time exposures required to photograph star fields,” and to “stay tuned for more photos like this.”

By the looks of it, the recent surreal shot of Earth made use of the same technology. Pettit was able to capture a clear view of the stars from low-Earth orbit.

Pettit also made headlines recently for sharing a video in which he jumped into his pants two legs at a time. For the record, I can do that too. And I don’t need zero gravity to make it happen—just ask my three pairs of torn pants.